iDroidBerry

ZOMG iMessage will change the world. Ages back, my blackberry did that. My droids have always done that. And Google Voice does that. I don’t think this will be the end of carriers since it hasn’t been yet and there are more droid and blackberry users than iPhone users.

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13 Responses to “iDroidBerry”

Lemme see – they plan on removing a revenue source from the carrier who is transmitting all that data anyway – so all the carrier has to do is jack the cost of the network connection to make up for the loss. Sounds like someone is just planning on taking a momentary advantage.
Folks, the Internet doesn’t arrive at your magic pocket data gizmo by osmosis – it takes a large (and expensive) system to get it there – and the folks who do that transport role are in business to make money. TANSTAAFL and all that..

Folks, the Internet doesn’t arrive at your magic pocket data gizmo by osmosis – it takes a large (and expensive) system to get it there

It’s the same system that does the data. Carriers make boatloads of profit on text messages, because they cost the carrier next to nothing to transmit. They essentially use the control signal to your phone to transmit the message. This is the reason for the 140 characters, because that band was never meant to transmit data. It’s similar to ICMP in IP.

Either way, this is capitalism at work. The carriers are charging monopoly prices on texting, so Apple and others are trying to undercut them.

Android borrowed most of the fundamental concepts for how you interact with the phone from iOS, so the “thievery” has worked both ways. I’m generally against patents on “look and feel,” and I don’t look too favorably on patenting things like screen gestures. So I’m generally fine with the idea of Android copying these things. But the iPhone was the first smart phone that had a decent user interface.

I had used Blackberries and Microsoft’s sorry excuse for a mobile OS (before Windows Phone 7), and I could use either of them for ten minutes before wanting to throw them out a window. Microsoft just thought putting a Desktop OS on a mobile device was the way to go, and Blackberries were navigated by little nubby trackballs that always seemed to gum up and work poorly. The UI was a disaster too, and enterprise support only came with a hefty price tag attached.

Before the iPhone, I was a Palm user, and that sucked too, just less than the alternatives. Palm has a nicer user interface, but it couldn’t do very much that was useful. Eventually I went back to a regular old dumb phone for a while.

So I don’t think it’s fair to discount the fact that Apple was first to the market with a Smart Phone that worked the way people wanted it to, many features of which were copied by competitors, who also added some pretty good ideas of their own.

If you go back and look at the original Android prototypes, they all looked like a Blackberry. And then the first iPhone came out and suddenly Android prototypes started looking like iPhones… some vendors outright copied some of the Apple icons.

I do wonder if the Droid fan boys have ever actually used an iOS product for any length of time and across a broad set of features. The touch system on iOS is far superior to Android, and though Android had cut-and-paster first it is an order of magnitude more aggravating than on iOS.

Cost of SMS is irrelevant to transport method – as noted, Layer 1 transport is “free”. Look upwards in the stack. More I cannot say without breaching NDAs.

Given AIM’s SMS gateway (And I think Yahoo has it as well) and Trillian’s multimode capabilities, I haven’t had to care whether someone’s up on IM or on SMS for quite some time. And I barely care what IM service they’re using.

Let me know when iOs lets me swap keyboards that are transparently integrated with the core OS and every app. That was probably my single biggest gripe with the iOs things I’ve played with – I cannot fricking STAND the default keyboard.

iOs has sexier and more efficient hardware – this is true across all of Apple’s product lines; one of the best Win7 machines I’ve ever used was a MacBook Pro.

iOs has sexier and more efficient hardware – this is true across all of Apple’s product lines; one of the best Win7 machines I’ve ever used was a MacBook Pro.

This may be true on iOS devices, which use Apple grown CPUs, which are implementations of the ARM RISC architecture, and sip power daintily, but your MacBook pros and Mac Pros are basically PC reference designs in fancy packaging. I’m typing this to you now on a PC I build myself running Mac OS… the design is similar enough this can be done if you download the programs that emulate the Mac EFI ROMs.

Granted, I’ve bought two MacBooks, and like the design and packaging. I’m willing to pay for it. But there are plenty of cheap PC laptops that can run Mac OS with a little creativity and effort if you just want something cheap.